maurice yacowar The foxtrot - a happy, spirited dance - is here a metaphor for quite the contrary: the hopeless ritual in which Israelis and Palestinians find themselves locked. They take a step forward, a step sideways, then it's back to their starting point. Instead of progress there's stasis - a malevolent antagonism and paralysis. With the macro dance not working, you seek comfort in the micro. You dance with your own, smoothing out differences and alienation so you can carry on. That's what Michael and his Dafna do at the end, overcoming their separation. The soldier's solitary dance with his rifle is the alternative to a couple or communal dance - solitary, masturbatory, an unconstructive indulgence. In the national context, citizens adapt to each others' errors and transgressions. They remain united against their common mortal enemy. That's why the army here covers up the accidental murder of the carload of young Palestinians. The film examines the moral cost of surviving in Israel's situation, besieged by a genocidal enemy. A mistaken identity can ruin a whole family of lives. The Feldmans fall into profound grief - till they learn the dead soldier is a stranger with their son's name. We don't see the other Feldman family's pain, but we can guess it. Indeed, the army rabbi's visit here suggests how common these deaths are in Israel, how ritualized their procedure has become. An hourly phone call reminds the bereaved to drink a glass of water. This is the normalization of loss -and it carries a psychological and moral cost. At the first death report Michael is buried in grief, frozen. In his sensitivity every sound registers loud: his body hitting a bed, the dog hammering the door to get in. In his repressed rage Michael kicks his pet, in impulsive anger that that life survived his son. But the dog remains faithful, tentative in his returns but always coming back to him. Like the Israeli citizens persisting under attack, he bears his pain and carries on. But like the other Israelis, the dog is silently bleeding within. Jonathan's actual death - on the trip home Michael insisted upon - splinters the parents' marriage. By now Michael has experienced enough grief to start handling it. He recovers his comfort, joy and marriage - by smoking weed with Dafna. That's the secular alternative to religious consolation. In contrast, Michael's mother has slipped from her nervous breakdown into dementia. Her speaking German instead of Hebrew shows her rooted in her past. She claims to register Jonathan's death -- but then confuses Michael with his brother Avigdor. The film shows a secular Israel. These Feldmans are non-observant. The story of trading the family heirloom Bible for a porn magazine handily conveys at least these Israelis abandoning religious tradition for the modern realities of life. As they face annihilation, pragmatism holds sway. In that existential danger even something commonplace can have soul-wrenching consequences. Hence the three traffic accidents. In the first Michael remains traumatized with unnecessary guilt for having sent another vehicle ahead of his own on the highway - to a mortal mine. That's the guilt hidden beneath the film's innocent opening shot. Only after he finally shares this secret with Dafna can they reconnect. He also feels responsible for his mother's breakdown. Son Jonathan machine guns a car when he mistakes a dropped pop-can for a grenade. If he escapes man's justice, he's killed in an absurd traffic accident en route home. His death, by the way, is absurd enough to be read as divine justice. When Jonathan draws a cartoon of the bulldozer hoisting the car (i.e., his guilt) to bury it, he's recording what his superiors have allowed him to keep secret. Dafna keeps the drawing, unaware of its implication. As Jonathan cartoons his father's Last Bedtime Story, a coming of age ritual, it's important that he include this personal admission of responsibility. There are plenty of justifications for not turning the accident into an international attack on the state fending off annihilation. The use of background artworks shows the care in this film's realization. Dafna's fainting reveals the drawing behind her, a large layering of black squares jumbling into the distance. The emblem of order and stability - the square - here expresses a vertiginous confusion. A high angle shot then spins above Michael against a floor of geometric squares, similarly dizzying and unstable. When Dafna moves the painting into another room it hangs tilted, askew, compounding the instability of even the stable. Michael's den has another black and white abstract painting - a fuzzified horizon line that evokes an ECG. Finally, Jonathan's secularity and sexual awakening are imaged in the washed out pinup girl face on the soldiers' metal barracks. Of course, that emblematic shed is sinking into the mire, endangering its young future. The Israeli government hates this film because that impulsive murder scene might be taken to imply that such IDF errors are frequent not freakish. Or worse, deliberate. But the tensions from Israelis living under constant threat of attack, especially for a handful of young soldiers alone at a remote security point, makes Jonathan's impulse understandable. Writer/director Samuel Moaz makes his focus the Israeli response to the Palestinian threat so he doesn't retell its history. The Palestinian citizenry here are themselves victims of the Palestinian assault against Israel - via Israels' defensive measures. Moaz's subject is the situation's challenge to the Israelis' moral compass. He's examining the Israeli's frozen foxtrot, not the Palestinians'. But the lesson holds for both partners not yet dancing together. This film is an insightful, moving revelation. Its dramatic shifts in tone, with surprises and shock at every turn, make this an emotional roller-coaster. But in framing out the Palestinian attack, in taking that context as understood not restated, the film may be read as suggesting that the Israeli moral compass causes the regional problem. Under existential threat what alternative does Israel have to hard security measures? Where are the Palestinian films that question the genocidal campaign that has for a century prevented their peaceful coexistence? After all, it takes two even to foxtrot. Finally, credit to Moaz's implicit revision of Chekov: A camel planted in Act 2 must go off in Act 5.

Howard Schumann Winner of the Silver Lion at the Venice International Film Festival and Israel's submission to the 2018 Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film, Israeli director Samuel Maoz's ("Lebanon") brilliant and confounding Foxtrot reveals itself less by narrative than by images: A narrow road in an empty stretch of desert, a lonely camel meandering through a checkpoint, a young recruit's gyrating dance in the middle of the road, soldiers in a panic opening fire. Though the images imply condemnation of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), the war, and Israel itself, Foxtrot is not an overtly political film but a family drama that has universal meaning to anyone who has suffered the unexpected loss of a loved one. The title suggests that life unfolds like a series of dance steps: Forward, side, and back in a preordained pattern, only to end up in the same place in which it began.Shown in the format of three connecting stories, in the first segment as Dafna Feldmann (Sarah Adler, "The Cakemaker") opens the front door of her upscale high-rise Tel Aviv apartment, she immediately knows that the look on the faces of officers of the IDF can mean only one thing. "Mr. Feldmann," says the first soldier to Michael (Lior Ashkenazi, "Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer") who is lurking in the background, "I'm sorry there's no easy way to say this. Your son Jonathan (Yonaton Shiray, "A Tale of Love and Darkness") was killed tonight in the line of duty." The officer does not say anything about the circumstances of his death, only that he had "fallen in the line of duty," a military euphemism that puts a brave face on another in an endless stream of deaths to report on.Speechless, almost catatonic, Michael is told to keep drinking water by the officer who programs his cell phone to ring every hour to remind him. A successful architect, former tank commander, and the son of a survivor of Auschwitz, the tragic news unleashes the hidden rage that Michael has carefully kept from public view, directing it towards the unfeeling military bureaucracy. Fate, Maoz suggests, is not an unyielding emanation from God, but an innate part of a people's legacy passed down through generations. When we learn that his family has roots in the Holocaust, we understand that his paralysis of feeling can be traced to a childhood of quashing his emotions, a situation that creates, "a new generation of victims." Though we can feel Michael's distress, his flashes of cruelty, especially towards his dog, are off-putting and perhaps designed to keep us at an emotional distance.The second segment takes place in a desolate military checkpoint known as "Foxtrot," a supply road used by Palestinian cars and wandering camels, located somewhere on Israel's northern border. Moving from black comedy to tragedy, the sequence is an almost dreamlike and surreal allegory that provides an absurdist view of the war. The young soldiers, including Michael's son Jonathan, form a four-man guard who have become increasingly bored with the daily routine. They pass the time in their shipping container which serves as a barracks by telling each other stories about their home life, eating unappetizing meals out of cans, and rolling an empty tin of canned meat towards the wall to see how fast their container is sinking into the mud.In one of the most indelible moments of Foxtrot, Jonathan hugs his rifle and performs an unencumbered joy-filled dance in front of the barracks, a scene reminiscent of Galoup's wild, uninhibited dance that ends Claire Denis' masterful "Beau Travail." Breaking the interminable quiet are cars carrying Palestinians seeking to pass through the checkpoint. Travelers are compelled to sit and wait for long periods of time and, in one instance, a couple dressed for a wedding are humiliated by being forced to stand outside in the pouring rain while the soldiers take their time checking their IDs. When an act of sudden violence against unarmed civilians occurs, an IDF commander covers it up, telling the perpetrators that they will not be punished, that unfortunate things sometimes happen in wars.In the third sequence, after the passage of several months, the film returns to the Feldmann's apartment as Michael and Dafna, now living apart, meet to remember what would have been Jonathan's twentieth birthday. Still processing their grief, Dafna strikes out at Michael for his weakness that she alleges caused Jonathan's death, but the music of Arvo Pärt's "Spiegel im Spiegel" tells us that, underneath the anger and the grief, their love is graced by the truth of acceptance and reconciliation and that, in the poet Rumi's phrase, "the night ocean is filled with glints of light." Foxtrot has been roundly condemned by Israel's Minister of Culture and Sport, Miri Regev, (who hasn't seen the film) for its "self-flagellation and cooperation with the anti-Israel narrative," calling it "a work of treachery," and asking for the state to end funding for films that can be used as "a weapon of propaganda for our enemies."In spite of the Minister's comments, Foxtrot won eight Ophir Awards (Israel's Oscar equivalent) including awards for Best Picture, Best Actor (for Ashkenazi), and Best Director. In an interview with The Times of Israel, Maoz responded to the critics by saying that the film was simply meant to open discussion and create dialogue, "If I criticize the place I live," he said, "I do it because I worry." After the recent killing of at least 15 unarmed Palestinians by Israeli soldiers near the barrier separating the Gaza Strip from Israel, an act for which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered neither sympathy nor remorse, perhaps it is time for all of us to worry.

bastille-852-731547 This highly acclaimed drama from Israel is a thoughtful and deep reflection on how we perceive of the scars that grief and guilt can leave on us. The film follows a patriarch and his wife who are told at the beginning of the film by Israeli army officers that their son was killed in the line of duty. These two parents begin to embark on a seemingly hellish grieving process...for the first 30 minutes. I won't give away what happens next, but the film ends up taking a variety of unique twists and turns through three distinct parts similar to that of a triptych-style narrative. It's not quite what you think it is, that's for sure.The acting in the film is consistently excellent, particularly the performance of the father. He manages to engage the audience in his seething feelings of sadness and an almost-primal sensation of rage, while still feeling uniquely down-to-earth and relatable. This is an almost impossible trick to pull off. Samuel Maoz clearly knows how to write thoughtful analysis of the society and people of Israel, with a clockwork level of precision--and props to him for that. The pacing in the film's three acts, however, could have been improved and can feel somewhat erratic in the movie's second half. Additionally, the finale of the movie is done in a somewhat peculiar manner that falls a bit short of what would most satisfy the viewer in terms of wrapping up the story. Still, I definitely recommend "Foxtrot" to those interested and thought this was quite a well-made film at the end of the day. 7.5/10

yakovsig It's not that it's bad, it's that it never could have been good. It's an irredeemable disaster from start to finish, an adventure that entertains only via glimpses of the adventure it should have been,A simplistic political allegory, a cliché script, and a lot of money from Europe,The local critics will probably be praised, the Academy members will award prizes, and the spectators wont show up to watch this one. It is amazing how Israelis react violently to the political criticism of those behind Israel's investment, and are totally impervious to the political agenda of the European parties that invest the money. The emotional and moral complexity of Israelis, as human individuals and as figures with an Israeli identity, the complex political reality of the Middle East, the unique truth in detail - are all rejected, discarded and actually erased for a simplistic, crude depiction of political allegory. Metaphor or allegory, where has the penetrating gaze gone, where is the complexity of life, where is the empathy?